I’m back for another discussion about Robert Jordan’s sprawling epic, The Wheel of Time. In an alternate universe, maybe my trepidation would be justified. Alas, I’m kind of blogging for an audience of two readers maybe— Hi Mom! Someday, perhaps my books will find an audience, and some fans will discover these old posts.

Anyway, I ramble. On to the topic of The Wheel of Time and Jordan’s choice to revive the Forsaken. That choice points to my biggest, deepest frustration with the Wheel of Time series. I take issue with the power balance between good and evil in the series.

Power balancing is always hard, especially in epic high fantasy. Readers crave an underdog. A story will struggle to generate page-turning tension in a world where good outmatches evil (maybe I’ll ramble about C.S. Lewis or Tolkien’s good-is-greater narratives at some point, but not today). Robert Jordan’s world presented as a cosmos with balance between good and evil, sort of a yin and yang kind of world… until it didn’t.

The Dark One has every advantage. That doesn’t inherently make a story bad. The original Star Wars Trilogy (episodes 1-4) succeeds on the strength of an overwhelming underdog story. The reason it didn’t work with the Wheel of Time is because it consistently robs all the narrative victories of any meaning.

Part one already discussed how that happened with the Forsaken. However, Robert Jordan’s universe led to an ending that I found profoundly unsatisfying. The series ended, not with a victory, but with a can kicked down the road. The Dark One essentially gets to try as many times as he wants, knowing that good cannot win. Rand’s victory was no victory, just a delay of the Dark One’s inevitable triumph. Humanity is doomed to retread the same conflict with each revolution of the series’ eponymous wheel. The ending is thematically consistent with the repeating cycles of the Wheel of Time. It’s just miserably unsatisfying, like we’re Phill Conners stuck in Punxsutawney. Groundhog Day worked because Phill grew with each cycle and eventually escaped. I would have found a similar conclusion to Jordan’s cycle far more compelling as an ending.